Ilana’s Repeated Suicide Attempts

Ilana Sommo’s repeated suicide attempts mark both the extremity of her marriage to Alexander Gideon and the lasting damage its crises caused their son, Boaz Brandstetter. Recalled in Ilana’s account and in Boaz’s later conversation with her, the attempts recur not as an isolated episode but as a pattern that brought her to hospital and shaped the child’s understanding of his family.

Context and Recurrence

Ilana places the attempts within the disintegration of her relationship with Alexander. Her retrospective account describes a marriage consumed by conflict and suspicion, alongside Alexander’s long absences and his repeated returns to confront her. She says that the suicide attempts began amid this period of marital turmoil. The account identifies pills and gas as methods, without suggesting that any attempt resulted in her death.

The episodes were repeated. Boaz remembers that whenever his mother attempted suicide, she was taken away to hospital. His recollection gives the pattern a domestic consequence beyond the immediate crisis: her absence became part of the child’s experience of the fighting between his parents.

Boaz’s Childhood Response

When speaking with Ilana, Boaz says that as a small child he thought his parents’ shouting and fighting were his fault. He connects his mother’s repeated hospitalizations to the rage he felt toward Alexander: at the time, he wanted to attack him and his friends. He describes instead having directed his anger at people around him, whom he used to beat up. The recollection therefore links the suicide attempts to Boaz’s childhood distress without claiming that they alone explain his later behavior.

Boaz contrasts that past with his present rejection of initiating violence. He says he now favors work and taking life more easily, and directs his concern toward himself and the country. His account makes clear that the change in outlook does not erase the earlier experience: he can name the mistaken self-blame that accompanied his childhood helplessness and distinguish it from what he believes now.

Significance in the Family History

The two recollections frame the same recurring crisis from different positions. Ilana’s account places the attempts inside the failure of her marriage; Boaz’s places them in the memory of a child who could not understand the adults’ conflict and interpreted it as his own responsibility. The hospital journeys, repeatedly witnessed by Boaz, connect Ilana’s private suffering to the anger and confusion that persisted in her son’s family life.